Prize pot

Thank you to everyone involved for making TADHack mini Chicago such a great event! Especially to Clarify, Dialogic, Flowroute, Matrix, Telestax, Truphone, Tropo, and IIT RTC Labs for making it possible. We had 50 people onsite, and two remote, with diverse backgrounds from IIT students to people in finance, manufacturing, and supply.

For many involved, TADHack was their first hackathon, it was their first pitch! From NG911 hacks, through dancing robots and heart attack applications, to innovative telecom enabled apps focused on making life better. You can see the summary of the winners in the weblog below.

Where?

Sponsors

Developer Resources

Clarify

Clarify is bringing technology from the lab to the real world to give people access to the power of data hidden in their audio and video. All of the signal processing, language analysis, and complex math sits behind an easy to use API with helper libraries and Quickstart guides to help you get you started in minutes. With Clarify’s API, developers can search audio and video archives easily and quickly. The Clarify API translates the audio and video into text documents, which can then be searched using keywords. You can see it in action on our demo page.

XMS’s standard media control interface support lets it plug into other TADHacks sponsors such as Telestax. PowerMedia XMS also offers a JavaScript API for WebRTC clients and RESTful API for media server control. Take a look at Vince’s winning myVirtualGolfLesson demo for some ideas on what PowerMedia XMS can do.

Dialogic is offering a number of pre-configured Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances to help get you going in minutes. These instances include an optional Telestax integration. Contact Vince Puglia to get set up with an instance and a personalized quick-start.

Flowroute

Flowroute is the only carrier to empower developers, enterprises and service providers with full access to the telephone network, and real-time control of services and features, while aligning the cost of voice communication more closely with the low cost of data.

Matrix

Matrix (matrix.org) is an open source distributed persistent messaging fabric with eventual consistency, open federation and strong cryptographic guarantees – used for securely exchanging messages and synchronising communication history between humans, devices and services with no single points of control or data ownership. It consists of an open standard defining RESTful HTTP APIs and open source, Apache-licensed reference server and client implementations for exchanging and persisting arbitrary JSON data. It can be to exchange group chat, voice or video calls, IoT data, or any information you could wish to publish/subscribe via an internet-wide open persistent messaging network.

The reference Matrix Web Client already supports WebRTC, so an idea for a hack would be to use or take inspiration from this code in your application. Please feel free to ask questions and chat to the matrix team in the official Matrix HQ chatroom!

Telestax

The Telestax challenge will evaluate Restcomm apps targeting marketing automation. The winner and the runner up app will be offered commercialization terms through the Restcomm App Store to a target audience of over 100 million subscribers.

Call tracking technologies are popular because inbound calls are the most lucrative type of lead. They are the sales reps’ most favorite kind of lead, and therefore the marketers most valuable measure to generate and track.

A couple of ideas for apps:
– WordPress plugin shortcode that renders a unique phone number for the web page its used on. Calls to such phone numbers will be tracked and correlated to their corresponding web page in Google Analytics.
– HTML5 / JavaScript Call to Action widget, which renders a phone number and a Click To Call (WebRTC) button. Mobile or Web users can call-in to discuss the product or service offered on the page where the widget is located, without having to navigate generic IVR menus. The widget will be integrated with Restcomm and a Marketing Automation Platform (e.g. HubSpot, Act-On, Spokal) to help measure conversion rates from visitors to closed won deals.

Tropo

Cloud API for Voice and SMS. Tropo makes it simple to build phone and SMS applications. You use the web technologies you already know and Tropo’s powerful cloud API to bring real-time communications to your apps.

Tropo Sandbox: Sign up and get access to the free Tropo sandbox to play with the Tropo API.

Tropo Support: There are several methods to get help on Tropo, whether you need best practice suggestions, answers to general how to questions/code problems or help brainstorming a solution to a unique problem you’re trying to solve.

Truphone

IIT RTC Lab

IIT RTC Labs will provide access to their NG9-1-1 test bed at the event location.

They will give each developer who requests it:
– The URL of our test bed’s SBC;
– A SIP User Name that will register with the SBC; and
– A short description of the NG9-1-1 test bed and calls flows.

This will allow the developer to point emergency calls to a Public Service Answering Point via the ESInet (Emergency Services IP Network).